Two Seconds

That is the surveillance video of the playground in Ohio where police shot and killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice. Someone called 911 to say that Rice had been pointing a pistol at people on the playground. The pistol was an AirSoft pellet gun, a realistic looking replica of a semiautomatic pistol. The orange safety cap had been removed. According to Reuters:

A patrol car pulls up to the gazebo, and two officers jump out and draw weapons. The view of the boy is obscured by the patrol car.

There is no audio on the video, but police said they told Rice to raise his hands three times before he reached for his pellet gun and was shot by an officer, police said. He died on Sunday.

Watch the video. Again, there is no audio, but how on earth can anybody order someone to raise his hands three times in two seconds? That’s how long it took from the time the police car stopped until Rice was lying on the ground, mortally wounded.

What you see is not always what you get, so we need to wait for the investigation. But this looks very, very bad for the Cleveland police. From the look of things on this video, that kid barely had time to react to the sudden appearance of a police car before he was on the ground with one or more bullets inside of him.

Here is surveillance video showing why someone called 911 on Rice. I can well imagine people on that playground being scared to death of a kid pointing a realistic-looking pistol at them. Had Rice not removed the orange safety cap, chances are nobody would have called the police, because they would have known it was a toy:

That said, there is virtually no time at all between the police car stopping and the officer shooting Tamir Rice. It’s hard to see what Rice was doing with his hands when the car stopped; maybe the police feared that he was about to shoot them. Still … two seconds? Really? This looks very, very wrong to me. In fact, this looks outrageous. I don’t blame people one bit for protesting this.

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153 Responses to Two Seconds

JonF: Self-defense is a right, not an obligation. The reason we honor police, firefighters, etc as heroes is that they choose to expose themselves to danger on behalf of society.

That means doing things like facing down armed children without immediately deploying your own weapon in self-defense.

People quickly presume these situations are “him or me,” but they are never that simple. So you see a gun in the kid’s hand. Maybe he just found it on the ground and doesn’t understand what it is. Maybe he does understand what it is, but isn’t capable of making it fire. Maybe it is loaded with blanks. Maybe lightning will strike before he can pull the trigger. Or maybe, as in this case, it was just a toy.

When police arrive at a scene and are shooting someone within two seconds, we have strong evidence that their desire for self-preservation outweighed their obligation to protect and serve.

Self-preservation is a very natural and human response. But if you are a police officer, your role is to suppress what may be natural in the service of society’s greater good. These officers did not do so. Whether it was because they acted in haste, were poorly trained, or what, we don’t know.

All we know for sure is that a child with a toy is dead. Something went very wrong.

Has anyone pointed out that it was more than 2 seconds? The camera is capturing every few frames so each “second” is really more. The organization I work for uses similar cameras, they have a delay of 6 seconds between frames so in the video above the actual delay between the car stopping and the kid getting shot would be closer to 12-18 seconds.

Please don’t anybody take this as me supporting the cops, I’m waiting to pick sides until more facts are known.

Sorry, but a kid carrying a realistic pellet gun
has once again been shot down for waving it around and terrorizing local people, who called in a report of an armed lunatic. Why are people surprised at the outcome?

All Americans are to blame– the millions of realistic “toy” guns thrust into the hands of children. The millions of guntoting open carry lunatics packing and pointing them, and of course the thousands of trigger-happy cops responding to reports of an armed public assault.

Who bought this “toy” and gave it to the little delinquent? I notice he has a cell phone he uses to call to brag about his gunfighting skills…
You people are sick.